Texas Reacts to the Health Care Mandate Ruling

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld Obamacare, what will the ripple effects be for Texas?

“The Affordable Care Act will eventually cost Texas big money,” the Texas Tribunewrote. The state will have to expand Medicaid (which, as the Tribune points out, already accounts for a quarter of the state budget) and set up health insurance exchanges. But the state’s health care projects have already received more than $45 million from the federal government thanks to the law.

Texas will see a lot of changes, as the state currently leads the nation in uninsured people, with a full 27.6 percent of the population lacking health insurance, Sommer Mathis pointed out at the Atlantic Cities.

Pundits and politicians on both sides of the aisle were quick on the draw with press releases of their statements on the ruling:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry: “This ruling will be a stomach punch to the American economy. It is a shocking disappointment to freedom-loving Americans desperate to get our country back on track. Obamacare is bad for the economy, bad for health care, bad for freedom. Americans have made clear their overwhelming opposition to its convoluted, burdensome and overreaching mandates. Freedom was frontally attacked by passage of this monstrosity – and the Court utterly failed in its duty to uphold the Constitutional limits placed on Washington. Now that the Supreme Court has abandoned us, we citizens must take action at every level of government and demand real reform, done with respect for our Constitution and our liberty.”

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told reporters on a conference call from Washington that the state must “work swiftly” to see “what is necessary for the state to comply with the new tax,” according to the Denton Record-Chronicle. “This decision caught both sides by surprise today,” Abbott said.

Abbott had more caustic words about the decision later in a statement: “This is an historic victory for individual liberty, states’ rights, and limited government. Today the Supreme Court made crystal clear that the federal government is more restrained than yesterday and yet, through a novel application of the facts, the Court did what Congress was afraid to do–called ObamaCare a tax on all Americans. This is particularly ironic since President Obama, himself, insisted this was not